Arctic launches Freezer 33, Freezer 33 CO

Cooling specialist Arctic has announced a generational improvement to its semi-passive Freezer 32 family of tower heatsinks, launching the unsurprisingly-named Freezer 33 range this week.

Based on the company's existing Freezer 32 family, the Freezer 33 range does away with one of the biggest annoyances of its predecessor: There's no need for separate Intel and AMD models, the Freezer i32 and Freezer a32 respectively, with any Freezer 33 being compatible with all current and recent socket types from both companies. This includes the AMD AM4 socket, as used by the company's latest Zen-architecture Ryzen processors and selected Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) parts.

As with its predecessors, the Freezer 33 offers semi-passive cooling. A pulse-width modulated (PWM) speed-controlled fan is activated only when the motherboard or fan controller calls for a duty cycle above 40 percent, meaning that at low loads when the CPU is primarily idle the fan doesn't spin at all. For those whose systems are constantly at a higher load, such as those participating in distributed computing projects or in a server environment, Arctic has a special variant: the Freezer 33 CO, or Continuous Operation, which has the same 40-percent-duty-cycle cut-off but with a dual-bearing fan the company claims is less sensitive to continuous rotation, dust, and high temperatures than the mainstream model.

Arctic also claims a range of other generational advantages to both the Freezer 33 and Freezer 33 CO models: tweaked off-centre heat pipe positioning for improved thermal dissipation, an improved layout to the 49-fin heatsink stack for better airflow, and a thin design which aims to avoid fouling RAM sockets even when used with an optional second fan.

Both the Freezer 33 and Freezer 33 CO are available now from Arctic's official webshop, priced at £40 for the Freezer 33 and £42 for the Freezer 33 CO (inc VAT). More information is available from the Freezer 33 and Freezer 33 CO product pages.